Close-up of a small black fine-line tattoo of a looped cross behind a person's ear, placed on the side of the neck.

Looped cross tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a cross with elongated, curling loops at the ends of its arms sits on the skin behind the ear. The lines are thin and even, with solid black ink and no visible shading. The photograph is a close-up of the ear and side of the head against a neutral skin tone, with a metal earring and a gold hoop earring in the frame.

Fine line Neck Cross Loop Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you touch that card, Nell, it's pricked for the Hollis veil and Mrs Hollis will have your hide. There. Put your pin in the hole, not beside it. Good girl. That cross you see is no saint's cross, whatever the vicar says. My mother's mother called it the Looping Cross, because you never work it in one go. You go round the arm, and round again, and every loop has to come back to the pin it started from, or the whole thing puckers like wet paper.

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In the winter of the big strike the pit shut and half the men walked off to Wales, and the lace was all that kept us out of the workhouse. Ada Pryce pricked a card for a cross like this and sent it to a London shop before the fire. The shop wrote back asking why the loops had gone wrong. Ada had not made them wrong. Someone had taken three bobbins from her sill in the night, and she had worked the last loop with a hairpin and her teeth gritted.

So she sat up with the lamp and worked each curl back on itself until it closed. She said a cross with an open loop was an unfinished prayer, and an unfinished prayer leaves the door on the latch. When the lace came back from London with the letter, the buyer had kept it, and every loop was sound. Hold your breath, child, and tug the thread gently. There. Now it's yours to finish.